


Tinderbox

by misseffect



Series: The Normandy Detective Agency [3]
Category: Mass Effect - All Media Types, Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1940s, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - No Reapers, Alternate Universe - Noir, Bickering, Detective Noir, Detectives, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Garrus has PTSD, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, Paragade (Mass Effect), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Post-War, Pre-Relationship, Shakarian - Freeform, Slow Burn, everyone is human, no plan only write
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-12
Updated: 2021-02-12
Packaged: 2021-03-12 07:13:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,493
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29381175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misseffect/pseuds/misseffect
Summary: Of stakeouts, close calls and bickering.Part of the Normandy Detective Agency series - collection of Noir / Human AU one-shots.
Relationships: Female Shepard & Garrus Vakarian, Female Shepard/Garrus Vakarian
Series: The Normandy Detective Agency [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2112396
Comments: 2
Kudos: 14





	Tinderbox

"I could get used to this, y'know. Anderson never drives me anywhere."

Shepard has her feet up on the dash of Garrus's black Chevy, ankles crossed, halfway out of the rolled-down window. Her shoes are jostling around in the footwell. When they're cruising along between intersections and a breeze gets up, it's downright pleasant, but the late-August heat is building the closer they crawl to midday. Garrus threw his jacket onto the back seat five traffic lights ago.

"I can brake suddenly if you feel like you're getting too comfortable," he offers.

"Not if you value your windshield, you can't." She flips a page in the pocket roadmap in her lap. "Next right - Sherman Way." 

They're on the edge of Reseda - once a flat, dusty expanse of orange groves, now L.A.'s latest suburban offering - to call on a client's recently-eloped daughter. It was a tale as old as time: boy meets girl, father hates boy, girl marries boy anyway. Except this particular boy has previous for aggravated assault - possibly gang-related - and by all accounts he's a big, mean-looking bastard. 

The girl went to live with her new husband two months ago and won't give her family the address - and that's where Shepard comes in.

"There - Payne and Co." Shepard heaves her legs back inside the car and starts toeing her shoes on. Garrus pulls up twenty or so yards along from the jewellery store.

Shepard laces up her shoes. "I'll be ten minutes."

He stops half way through reaching into the back seat for his jacket. "I thought you wanted me in case the Miller kid showed up? I'm no use sat in the car."

"Yeah - at the house, if we can find it. He's not staking out her workplace." She pops the door open and already she can feel the heat radiating off the sidewalk. "You're distinctive, Garrus, they'll remember you. They see a hundred women a day."

Shepard has dressed forgettably today, in muted colours, with her red hair tied back in a headscarf and her piece shut out of sight in her purse. If Miller ever comes asking after them, she doesn't want anybody painting him a picture - however much she hates working without a holster.

"I'm distinctive no matter what I'm doing," Garrus retorts. "You should've thought of that before you hired me."

 _I didn't hire you_ , she thinks, waspishly.

Garrus has so far proven himself an undeniably good case man, but Shepard feels like she's spent three months in a never-ending bickering match - over interview notes, over filing, over where to go first, over what to do next. Any warmth he might have felt towards her after their meeting in Exposition Park seemed to have dissolved rapidly. Anderson started giving Garrus his own cases after three weeks just to get them away from each other. 

And with Joker buzzing around somewhere across the Pacific on a new posting, it'll be Christmas by the time she has anything at all on the 28th Division.

"Ten minutes," she repeats.

He looks stony-faced but says nothing.

When Shepard leaves the store fifteen minutes later, Garrus is browsing a newspaper stall in the shade across the street and watching the door. He's got his jacket back on to hide the revolver strapped under his arm. Shepard jerks her chin towards the car. He makes a show of checking his watch, which she ignores.

"She's sick," Shepard says, once they're back in the car. The seats have gotten uncomfortably hot in their absence.

"Hasn't been in work for two days. They spoke to her on the phone but nobody's seen her."

"Did you get the address?" 

"Yeah, it's a couple blocks into the new development - not far." Shepard had pretended to be an old school friend. She can't really pass for twenty-three anymore but if she says it with enough confidence, people don't like to ask.

She's getting an increasingly bad feeling about all this that she can't quite place. The store owner didn't seem concerned about the girl, but the shop assistant - a mousey sort of woman in an pea green dress - had hovered about and fidgeted with her rings until, unable to linger convincingly any longer, Shepard left.

Maybe Miller's previous is getting to her. Anderson tries to keep them clear of any gang business and she trusts his judgement, but it _had_ taken him a while to decide whether they should take this one.

They find the house without any trouble and it doesn't do anything to put Shepard's trepidation to bed. It's easily the biggest on the street; a two-story affair, painted brick red with white accents around the windows, porch and roof. There's a palm tree in the front yard and lines of squat, scruffy bushes under the windows.

Garrus whistles as they approach. "How old are these kids?"

"Early 20s." Shepard says, darkly. There's a sleek, blue convertible parked outside.

"Maybe we should check her pockets for diamonds while we're here," he says. "What's the plan?"

"Hang a right at the end of the road. We'll park up nearby and make another pass in twenty minutes."

Garrus glances at her but says nothing.

"What?" Shepard says, testily. He won't disagree with her unless he's prompted; he'll just keep looking at her sideways and fidgeting until she asks.

"You don't think we should watch the house?"

"It's a curtain-twitching kind of neighbourhood," she says. "Every man and his dog will get a nice long look at us before anything interesting happens."

And the girl doesn't drive so it's sure as hell not her car. They park up in the shade of a department store a block or so away, under a billboard with a huge, grinning apple twirling a breadstick; an advert for the farmer's market on Third and Fairfax.

"Miller really skeeves you out, doesn't he." Garrus unsticks his shirt from his back and starts to roll up his sleeves. It's not going to be a comfortable stakeout.

"He was in the slammer at seventeen for making a cripple out of his foreman," Shepard says. "You wanna lose your knees over this? Be my guest."

Though Miller was never officially linked to anything bigger, it was around the same time as a spate of well-publicised kneecappings by the L.A. Mafia. They're under new management these days - as far as Shepard understands - and they seem to be keeping their business fairly well underground, but it's not like they've gone anywhere.

"Aria T'Loak," Garrus says. "I met her on a job once, years ago, before she was running the show. Nasty piece of work."

Shepard is fanning herself with her notebook and watching the street for the convertible. "That can't be her real name, can it?"

Garrus shrugs. "If I was running the biggest mafia outfit this side of Chicago, I don't think I'd use my real name either."

Shepard can't argue with that. She extracts a cantina of water from the glove compartment. A police car goes wailing past, weaving through traffic.

"What's Vakarian, by the way - Spanish?"

"Italian," he says. "My dad was born here but his parents emigrated from Veneto in '99."

Shepard squints at him. "New York?"

"Can you tell?" he says, with a grin.

"Sometimes."

She had noticed an East Coast twang on his vowels. It wasn't strong, but it was audible if you listened for it. Shepard takes a long chug from the cantina. If this goes on all afternoon they'll have to find a water fountain.

"What about you?"

"Wisconsin." She pulls a face and screws the lid back on the bottle. "Not half as glamorous but I can rope cattle like you wouldn't believe."

Garrus chuckles; he thinks she's kidding. "I don't think I saw a live cow until I was nine."

When he's not being an ass, he isn't such bad company. They make two more passes on the house, each from a different direction, and park up somewhere new afterwards. On the third pass - at about 1pm - the convertible is gone.

"What now?"

They've pulled up at the far end of the road. Shepard is checking her revolver while Garrus pulls his jacket back on.

"We knock."

He raises an eyebrow. "Just like that?"

"I know how much the LAPD likes kicking down doors, but we don't have the luxury of a search warrant." She sticks the revolver down the back of her pants. "We knock. Then we'll see."

Best case; the girl answers the door and they get what they came for.

The girl doesn't answer the door. Nobody does. 

Shepard tries a bell twice more and sends Garrus to check the back of the house. There's a faint incense smell floating around - like a mosquito coil - but Shepard can't tell where it's coming from.

Garrus reappears around the corner. "Looks like nobody's home. One of the back windows is off the latch though," he adds, quietly.

She follows him around into the yard, slowing to check the windows. Lounge and kitchen; both quiet and unremarkable, nothing out of place. The back yard is much the same - a clothes pole, a watering can, a sun lounger and a pergola in one corner of the lawn. Sure enough, the latch is hanging off the window into the utility room. They could easily lift it between them.

In all likelihood the house is empty. Nobody knew they were coming, so there's no reason for them to ignore the doorbell. Any indication they can find that the girl does live here would help them, but her father did explicitly ask Shepard to _speak_ to her. Breaking in is a risk and they need a payoff.

But Shepard really wants this over with. The sooner it turns out to be a boring, ill-judged elopement, the happier she'll be.

The back fence is bordered by a row of garage buildings and there's no vantage point from the neighbouring houses.

"God help us," Shepard mutters. "Alright - gimme a hand."

They manage to slide the window up and climb through. The house shows every sign of being vacated by its residents for the day. There are dishes on the side from breakfast and shoes lined up in the hall. Other than a clock in the lounge and distant traffic noise, it's quiet. Shepard draws her gun.

Garrus is frowning. He taps the end of his nose. _Can you smell that?_ he mouths. The incense smell is still lingering.

It's odd; looking at the house from the outside, Shepard expected more. The furniture is simple, mismatched and a little worse for wear. There's nothing on the walls, no photographs on the mantle, no bookcases or sentimental nik-naks on window ledges - the house is lived-in but it's decidedly un-homey.

When they reach the stairs, Shepard tugs Garrus's sleeve to get his attention. There's something moving in an upstairs room; a faint shuffling, creaking, whimpering noise. 

What? Garrus mouths, apparently unable to hear anything.

She taps her ear and points to the stairs. He nods.

The doors to the upstairs rooms are all standing open. They take one side of the landing each and clear the rooms quickly. There's same sparse feeling here as downstairs; nothing specifically wrong that Shepard can point to, just an odd, slightly uncanny feeling.

There's one more room left to check on Shepard's side; the noises go quiet as they approach. She glances at Garrus, who raises his revolver, steely-faced. Shepard swings around the corner gun-barrel first - and stops dead.

Their girl is home all right; gagged, with her arms tied to the bedposts and tears pouring down her face.

"Is he here?" Shepard whispers.

The girl shakes her head. Shepard glances at Garrus, who has the resigned look of somebody who's seen worse but can't help being disappointed anyway.

"Alright, honey. It's okay." Shepard stows her gun back in her belt, sits down on the bed and wipes the girl's face with her sleeves. "It's Elena, isn't it? Your dad sent us to check up on you." The girl nods.

One of these days Shepard will get her nice, boring elopement. The knots are savagely tight around her wrists and at the back of her head. Shepard's Swiss Army knife is out of commission after she snapped the blade last week and it'll take an age to work the rope loose by hand.

"Garrus, get a knife from the kitchen." Shepard says, without looking around.

There's a crackling, rushing sort of noise building behind her - what the hell is he doing back there? - and the incense smell suddenly seems - 

Wait a second.

"Garrus - "

His hand lands on her arm and squeezes, hard enough to hurt. Shepard whips around. There's smoke creeping along the ceiling in the landing.

"Motherfucker," she spits. "Shut the door."

Garrus doesn't move. He's still got a handful of her sleeve.

"Garrus - " She yanks her arm away. " - shut the door, now."

He just stares at the smoke coiling through the door onto the bedroom ceiling. Elena is sobbing, muffled through the rag in her mouth, and shaking so hard Shepard can hardly get a handle on the ropes.

"Garrus!" She grabs him by the shoulders and pulls him to face her. He's white and wide-eyed and shivering almost as much as Elena. Wordlessly, he shakes his head.

She's never yet asked what happened to his face

Shepard lets go of him. "Okay," she says, with forced calm. "Alright."

These houses are made of tinder and it's a boiling Californian afternoon; if they're lucky, they've got about three minutes. She steers him towards Elena.

"Keep trying the rope."

Shepard snatches the comforter and pillows off the bed. Turned away from the door, Garrus seems to regain a bit of motor function and starts working on the knots.

The stairs are completely engulfed. Planks from the adjacent walls are crumbling into the pyre and flames are chewing along the wallpaper towards her like a fuse. Shutting the door feels like plugging a bursting dam with her finger but she does it anyway, stuffing the comforter into the gap below the door and stamping the pillows down on top. There's a dressing table with a spotted old mirror in the corner of the room. Shepard starts to rifle through the drawers - a comb, a Bible, a necklace, a bottle of cologne.

"Elena - " She can see Garrus's back and the girl's legs in the mirror. " - are there scissors in here? Anything sharp?"

It's Garrus who answers, strained and hoarse. "The wardrobe."

Shepard flings the wardrobe doors open and shoves the clothes aside along the railing. There's a sewing machine in the bottom - among a jumble of shoes and purses and dropped scarves - and next to it, a leather bag. Shepard tears into it and - yes - fabric scissors.

There's smoke seeping in around the edge of the door, and the heat radiating through the far wall builds as Shepard saws at the rope on one of the bedposts. Garrus is still fumbling the other.

One of Elena's arms comes free and she scrabbles at the rope over her mouth

"I know, honey. We're almost there." Shepard climbs over to the other side of the bed. Garrus drops back out of her way; he's breathing like he's been running. "Get the window open."

Orange flares in her peripheral as Garrus stumbles to the window. Elena's eyes are bloodshot and terrified. 

"Shepard, I can't - it's stuck."

"Then break it."

She kicks the beside table towards him and goes on sawing. Picking broken glass out of his hands isn't how she'd like to celebrate evading a painful, fiery death. The comforter by the door is blazing, sending up thick, dark smoke, but she's almost there - almost -

The rope snaps. Shepard hauls Elena to her feet and Garrus smashes the corner of the table through the window.

Shepard clears the broken glass off the bottom edge of the window with the scissors and sticks her head out. There's smoke pouring out of the window below but she can just make out bushes on the ground underneath.

"Elena - here." Shepard discards the scissors and pulls her towards the window. Fire is starting to climb the bedroom walls. "Go out backwards - like you're going down a ladder - that's it." Shepard keeps hold of Elena's arms as the climbs out. "Hold onto the ledge and - " Smoke catches in her throat and she coughs into her shoulder. " - and when I say go, drop down into the bushes, ok? D'you understand?" Elena nods.

Shepard can feel the heat pounding on her back. Garrus's hand is white-knuckled on the window frame in the corner of her eye. Elena walks her feet down the wall. Shepard is holding onto the remains of the rope around her wrists, one foot braced against the wall.

"Three," Shepard shouts, over the howling fire, "two, one - " 

They both let go and Elena drops. She lands hard in the bushes and scrambles away.

"Garrus - "

Shepard turns and it's like staring into the sun. Flame licks across the ceiling and four feet away from them the bed is catching. There's a crumbling, crashing sound from somewhere deeper in the house, like the whole damn place is about to come down on their heads. She yanks her shirt up over her nose and mouth, and grabs hold of whatever bit of Garrus she can find.

"Move - come on - " 

He's clumsy and wooden. She practically has to move his limbs for him. His torso is still half inside when one of the curtains goes up.

"NOW!"

Shepard shoves his shoulders and he drops out of sight. Then, she jumps.

She knows she's going to land badly before she hits the ground. Her feet make the bushes but she pitches forward, off balance, and her weight comes down on her left wrist. She feels something pop; she'll find out how bad it's going to hurt later, after the adrenaline steaming through her tapers off.

Elena is by the fence, being helped out of the gag over her face by a woman - maybe a neighbour. Garrus is a few feet away, on all fours, throwing up. Shepard staggers away from the billowing smoke and flops onto her back, panting and holding her wrist. If she ever gets ahold of Miller...

"God, Shepard, what happened to you?"

It's 4pm before she makes it back to the office, sweaty and sooty and bruised. By the time the fire brigade arrived the house was starting to burn itself out anyway; the roof caved a minute or so after they got out.

"Close encounter with a bonfire." Shepard says, dryly. "Found the girl though."

"With a - ?" Ash shakes her head and decides to park that for later. "Where's Garrus?"

"Errands. He'll be back."

Garrus gave a statement to the cops but she'd hardly managed to get another word out of him after that. When they pulled up outside the office, he'd muttered something about going for a drive and gunned it the second she got out of the car.

Shepard dumps herself down at her desk and reaches for the phone, holding the receiver and dialing awkwardly with the same hand.

Ashley's eyes narrow. "What's wrong with your arm?"

Shepard hides her wrist in her lap, under the desk. It's already started to swell up and the pain is a distracting, persistent ache.

"Jumped out of a window. I'll tell you about it - " she adds, because Ashley has opened her mouth again, incredulous. " - just lemme do this first."

Shepard sandwiches the receiver into her shoulder and waits for the dial tone. She rubs her nose. The heel of her hand comes away with a black smudge. 

"Mr Letterman - it's Jane Shepard," she says. "How's Elena? Good... I'm glad - yeah, there's a warrant out for his arrest... uh-huh - no - mosquito coils are an old arsonist trick. They burn slow. Gives 'em time to get away. Looks like he put it under the stairs." Ashley throws a balled up handkerchief at her. _Thank you_ , Shepard mouths. "Yeah, they'll book him for attempted murder and arson if they can track him down. Maybe insurance fraud too. No - don't mention it - lucky we showed up when we did."

"Shepard, please let me take you to a doctor."

"It's a sprain, Ash, it'll go down."

It's five-thirty and the pain in Shepard's arm is nauseating. Her left wrist is twice the size of her right. 

"You're being ridiculous. This is that chest infection all over again – which I doubt you even remember, because you were delirious."

"Pshh - " Shepard waves her good hand. " - those pills didn't do anything, I was turning a corner anyway."

Ashley rolls her eyes. Garrus is watching them from his desk in the corner. He'd arrived back half an hour ago in a change of clothes, subdued, but with a bag of ice for Shepard. She's resting her wrist carefully on top of it while water drips steadily onto the floor.

"Shepard hates hospitals." Ashley informs Garrus, as if she's not in the room. Shepard scowls. It's the doctors she hates, actually. Nasty, controlling, conniving little know-it-alls.

"It really does look broken, Shepard," Garrus says.

"Don't you start," she snaps.

When she had recounted the afternoon's adventures to Ash, she left out Garrus's funny turn - he'd looked shame-faced enough as it was - but she isn't above walking that back.

The office door swings open. It's Anderson, back from a meeting with some R&I buddies.

"Everybody alright? I heard about Miller on the scanner.” He shakes his head, mutinous. “That sonuvabitch - I knew something was rotten."

"Shepard broke her wrist and won't let me take her to the hospital." Ashley says, swiftly, before Shepard can answer.

"It's not broken," she says, loudly. "It's a sprain."

Who needs siblings when you get all the tattling a person could ever want at work? Anderson takes one look at Shepard's arm and points her to the door.

Shepard deflates a little in her chair. "Sir - "

"Now, Shepard."

And that's the end of that. She scowls at Ashley, who gives her a commiserating sort of look, and follows Anderson out.

It's 8pm and Garrus is still at his desk. He's scribbling intently and doesn't seem to notice Shepard come in. She's bone-dead tired and a little spun out on whatever painkiller they'd stuck her with at the hospital. Taking the stairs up to the office felt like wading through glue.

"Late night?"

He doesn't look up.

"Garrus," she says, a little louder. He starts.

"Shepard," He closes the notebook. His eyes go to the sling first. "How's your arm?"

"Broken," she says, morosely. He makes a sympathetic face and, to his credit, doesn't say he told her so. "I'll get a cast in a couple days once the swelling goes down."

"You need a ride home?"

"Anderson's taking me, I came up to get my purse. Thanks though."

The outer edges of her desk are scattered with files and notes. The middle would be too, usually, but she'd cleared space for the ice pack. Somebody's moped up the water in her absence. She packs a few things away half-heartedly and mostly at random, but shuffles Elena's file to the front so she'll remember update it tomorrow.

She fishes her purse out from under the desk and her holster from a drawer in her desk. Not that she can wear it with a sling anyway.

Garrus stretches and cracks his neck one way, then the other. She hadn't given his scars all that much thought until this afternoon. She noticed his ear after a few days: a prosthetic - a good one, convincing from a distance - attached to his glasses, which she's pretty sure he doesn't actually need to see. Plenty of men who saw action had injuries; she's more interested in what the hell he was supposed to have been doing than how he got hurt.

"Are you alright?" she asks, before she can talk herself out of it.

"I'm fine." He doesn't quite meet her eye.

"You're sure? That was - " She has no idea what the right words are. Her brain feels sludgy. "Well - it was quite a thing."

You get to understand fear in this line of work. It's not indulgent horror movie screaming - it's frantic, animal panic; it's bone-deep nausea; it's absolute, irrevocable shut-down. Shell shock. Battle fatigue, they call it these days.

"I'm just - " He shakes his head a little. "I'm sorry you got hurt." And he looks it, too.

She waves her good arm dismissively. "I don't bounce like I used to, that's all."

A childhood spent falling off horses and out of trees should've prepared her better, really. Garrus is worrying a square of note paper between his fingers, rolling it into a little coiled tube. Shepard stares at him.

"You don't think it was your fault, do you?"

For a second he says nothing. She's reminded again of the car ride back from Reseda - his tight, blank expression and his hand fumbling for the turn signal. Of the bag of ice placed wordlessly on her desk.

"You would've had more time," he says, stiffly, without looking at her. "If you weren't trying to drag me around."

She has a bizarre urge to laugh. "Garrus, the stairs were on fire," she says. "We were going out the window whether you were there or not, it wasn't your fault. Listen, honey - " She sits down on the edge of his desk. "Ash is terrified of clowns. They're the only thing in the world that makes her cry." Garrus finally looks up at her, all blue eyes and worry. "If we ever have to investigate a murder in a circus, Anderson'll just give the case to me."

"It could've been worse," he says. "A lot worse."

"But it wasn't," she says, soothingly. "Everybody's got something. It's not a big deal."

She doesn't always agree with him and nor does she always like him, but if he can look his own personal hell in the face and try to get the job done anyway - that, Shepard can respect.

"We'll usually know if it's an arson job. We got unlucky this time." She almost adds that most people just strangle their wives and bury them in the hills, but that doesn't seem like it'll make him feel better. "I'll talk to Anderson."

"You don't have to - "

"Well, I'm going to."

Shepard understands fear, and it's Garrus shaking his head silently over and over and over as the walls burn down around them. Eat your heart out, Hitchcock.

"Thank you," he says. And he means it. There's something so... bare-faced about him. An uncomplicated kind of sincerity that keeps catching her off-guard. Christ, she must be high as a kite.

Shepard claps him on the shoulder in what she hopes is an amicable sort of way. "Don't tell Ash I told you about the clowns." He smiles; sheepish still, but marginally more relaxed. She swings her purse over her shoulder. "G'night."

"Night, Shepard."

**Author's Note:**

> Em dashes? In MY fic? It's more likely than you think.
> 
> WHEW action sequences are hard. Sorry about your everything, Garrus.
> 
> Thanks, as always, for taking the time to read and interact with this series in any capacity. The word count won't keep going up and up forever. Promise.


End file.
